Wednesday 9 April 2014

UK government pushing for ODF as preferred standard for document formats

The UK government has moved ahead with their strategy to put stronger focus on open standards in the public sector. One important element here is the decision to select ODF as the preferred standard for document formats. ODF is widely supported, including by big vendors of software for office suits as well as in open source offerings.


There was an interesting article on PCWorld looking at the standards issue and debate underlying the decision of the UK government. Definitely worth reading.

Thursday 3 April 2014

CEN, CENELEC, ETSI hand over white paper on Cyber Security to Commissioner VP Kroes

Earlier this week a delegation of CEN, CENELEC and ETSI headed by MEP Dr. Christian Ehler met with Commissioner VP Kroes for handing over the white paper on cyber security that was developed within the Cyber Security Coordination Group (CSCG) established by the three European Standards Organisations (ESO).

The White Paper is available for download on the CSCG website which is hosted by DIN.

For some pictures of the event see also the respective web site from the Commission. ETSI has also published an announcement with some good links leading a bit further.

At first reading the White Paper is very much high level and spans from generic political recommendations to the actual technology work in standardisation. Certainly a good, broad overview of aspects to consider further.

As ETSI point out in their press release, a lot of work is already ongoing in security standardisation, most notably in ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27 but, of course, also in IETF, W3C and IEEE and others. As I strongly believe in bottom up approaches as it comes to standards developments it will be the chance of the stakeholders in IT security technologies to map the white paper recommendations with their work and take up whatevery makes sense and in whatever organisation has the best expertise for doing the work.